How StorPool Compares to All-Flash Arrays
Organizations looking to get the most performance from the storage running their business-critical applications often look to all-Flash storage arrays. Solid state Flash drives out-perform hard disk drives in IOPS, throughput, and latency. StorPool, a software-defined storage (SDS) platform, delivers performance as good – if not better – than all-Flash hardware arrays.
StorPool is a commercial, fully-managed SDS platform purpose-built for ultra-high performance and reliability with massive scale and low latency in block-storage environments.
All-Flash storage arrays are expensive specialized hardware using solid state drives for performance and reliability. All-Flash vendors tout the performance while downplaying the high cost of their hardware.
The Performance Gap
The primary difference between the two platforms is the level of sustained performance delivered under heavy workloads. All-Flash array numbers quoted come from an average across five different all-Flash arrays.
Latency
IOPS
Throughput
What Reliability Looks Like With StorPool
The operational stability of a storage cluster depends on both the software architecture and the management expertise applied to it. For StorPool, that combination translates into measurable results for customers running mission-critical workloads.
Reliability
Customers have measured 99.999% actual uptime. Its parallel multi-node shared-nothing architecture ensures no single point of failure and maintains performance during drive or node failures.
Management Model
StorPool is delivered as a fully-managed service. The StorPool engineering team handles deployment, 24/7 proactive monitoring, non-disruptive updates, and tuning.
Backup and Disaster Recovery
StorPool uses replication of snapshots for built-in backup and disaster recovery. Some all-Flash arrays can do the same, but may require additional software licensing.
The Real Cost of Running StorPool vs. All-Flash
While the acquisition cost of software varies, the total cost over a lifecycle favors StorPool in performance-intensive environments.
Acquisition: StorPool requires a commercial license. All-Flash arrays require commercial software licenses plus expensive hardware.
Hardware Costs: StorPool runs on the commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) servers of the customer’s choice. It can run on re-purposed servers. An all-Flash array is a highly-specialized and expensive piece of hardware.
Operational Expense (OPEX): StorPool’s managed service model eliminates the need to hire or train a dedicated storage ops team. All-Flash arrays incur high OPEX due to the need for specialized staffing and the time spent on manual tuning.
Overall ROI: StorPool typically delivers a 40-50% lower TCO than all-Flash arrays through reduced management overhead and far less expensive hardware.
Feature Comparison
From block-level performance to snapshot efficiency and day-to-day manageability, this table breaks down exactly how StorPool and all-Flash compare across the features that matter most for production storage environments.
Feature |  | All-Flash  |
|---|---|---|
Block storage | Y | Y |
File storage | Y Max. volume 64TB | Some brands |
Object storage | N | Some brands |
Triple mirroring | Y | N |
Erasure Coding | Y | Y |
Latency | 100 microseconds | 0.1 to 1 ms |
Throughput | 1TB/s | Up to 45 GB/s |
IOPS | Up to 113 Million | Up to 5 Million |
iSCSI | Y | Y |
NVMe/TCP | Y | Some brands |
Quality of Service | Y Live data-in-place tier changes | Some brands |
Snapshots | Y Nearly limitless | Y |
Low overhead snapshots | Y No effect on performance | N Snapshots affect performance |
Built-in advanced monitoring | Y | N |
Built-in analytics | Y | N |
Deployment | Assisted and Easy | Fairly Straightforward |
Maintenance | Proactive Fully-Managed Service | None |
Stop Managing Storage. Start Trusting It.
All-flash arrays offer hardware speed but come with premium costs and manual management. For mission-critical workloads that demand extreme performance, a lower TCO, and zero operational overhead, StorPool delivers more.